“Real Landscapes” is a series of photographs by German artist Thomas Wrede. You see gorgeous landscapes: beaches, mountains, sand dunes, iced lakes, under tranquil light or in dramatic sunset. Suddenly there is some sort of human intervention: a house, utility poles, or even a football pitch. They look a bit out of place in the middle of the vast nature. It makes you wonder if they are actually real. This sense of “eerily pleasant uncertainty” turns a seemingly specific location into a “non-place.”
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| Beach Hotel, 2008 |
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| Fjord, 2010 |
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| Ice Hole, 2010 |
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| Drive-In Theatre, 2009 |
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| Dari King Drive-In, 2007 |
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| Football Pitch, 2008 |
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| Settlement, 2005 |
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| Real Landscape |
The questioning of reality and perception is Thomas Wrede’s main field of interest. “I see the world as a kind of assembly kit, a grand stage, as image and simulacrum.” His photographs were shot no more than half a meter above the ground, using miniature models in actual places, and playing with scale and perspectives. What appears as an endless ocean could actually be just a puddle. His bizarre realism makes false presences very convincing. The ambiguous and absurd-surreal quality of these images challenges our perception of nature and its relationship to man.
Contrary to Wrede’s subtle ambiguity, Spanish photographer Victor Enrich’s City Portraits are full-on bizarre. Enrich manipulated his own architectural photography to create impossible and fantastical structures. Buildings were rotated, bent, unzipped, or with some parts extruded. After a career in the field of architectural visualization for over 10 years, Enrich is fully equipped with CG pictorial techniques that make the strange “incepted” scenarios visually believable.
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| Manuela is getting late, Munich, 2012 |
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| 12 Ugly Ducks, Munich, 2012 |
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| Shalom 2, Tel Aviv, 2009 |
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| Tango 4 |
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| Looping, Riga, 2007 |
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| Medusa, Tel Aviv, 2011 |
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| Tongues, Tel Aviv, 2010 |
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| Deportation, Tel Aviv, 2011 |
Looks like Inception? We also have Star Wars, perhaps even with a touch of David Lynch. French photographer Cédric Delsaux created hyper-realistic images using Star Wars characters and spaceships in his “Dark Lens” series. From Paris to Dubai, you see Darth Vader, C-3PO and R2-D2 hanging in stark urban settings, AT-AT walkers moving in the fog, or the Millennium Falcon docked on a construction site. With digital collage enhancements, Delsaux has turned George Lucas and Ralph McQuarrie’s fantasy into almost “feel-nomal” moments in our physical reality.
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| Darth Vader |
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| The Emperor |
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| C-3PO and the White Visa |
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| 3 AT-AT |
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| The Round of Battle Droids |
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| The Buick |
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| AT-AT in the Fog |
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| The Millennium |
Today, we have powerful image creation technology thanks to the innovations in computer graphic softwares. The bizarre realism in photographic art subverts the credibility of photography as a documentation or reproduction of reality. What is real and what is not? “See it and believe it” probably won’t work any more. Or maybe reality is just a collection of constructed illusions after all.
Related: Unreal Reality
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